At least two more Pennsylvania residents have been deported to Bhutan. That brings the total to eight Bhutanese refugees from Pennsylvania and 20 from across the country who have been deported back to Bhutan, according to leaders from those communities who have been tracking cases.
In early March, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents began arresting members of the Bhutanese refugee community in Central Pennsylvania. The first deportation flight came on March 26, less than three weeks after the initial arrests, with the next flights on March 28 and April 10.
Craig Shagin, a lawyer for one of the recently deported men, said his client was flown to Paro, Bhutan.
Declining to name the client due to concerns for his safety and privacy, Shagin said the man was interrogated by Bhutanese officials, given the equivalent of $350, and sent across the border into northern India.
“Not only does he not have documentation, no country has ever acknowledged him to be their citizen,” Shagin said. “He is truly a stateless person.”
Four of the first group of Bhutanese refugees deported by the U.S. are now in jail in eastern Nepal. Those men arrived in Bhutan only to be sent to the border with India, where they said Bhutanese officials hired taxis to take them to the border with Nepal. Their situation was confirmed by human rights activists and reporters in Nepal and in calls made by the deported individuals to family still living in the U.S.
Once on the Nepali border, the men used the money given to them by Bhutanese officials to pay smugglers to help them enter the country, according to a report from a Nepal-based human rights group. As with Shagin’s client, none of those men were given documents that could be used for their identification or tie them to any nation.
The fate of at least 16 other deportees remains unknown, according to human rights activist Gopal Krishna Siwakoti. He visited the men in jail and is now pressuring the Nepal government for their release. He is also calling for the U.S. and Bhutanese governments to halt their cycles of deportation.
In more than 35 years working with refugees across the Asia Pacific region, Siwakoti said he has never witnessed such a complex situation regarding refugee mobility.
“We don’t know what will happen to these people, and so these people must be scared about their future,” he said.
For that reason, he believes the other people who have been deported are in hiding.
Narad Adhikari, himself a former refugee from Bhutan and now a U.S. citizen living in Central Pennsylvania, said the cycle of statelessness has created panic and trauma in the community, especially since ICE did not make it clear why it was arresting people now.
“ Bhutan’s government is violating directly the fundamental rights of the individual who have the right to live in the country,” Adhikari said.
Silence from governments
Each of the Bhutanese individuals arrested and deported by ICE has a criminal conviction and an order of removal from an immigration judge, according to public records reviewed by WITF.
Those charges range in severity from verbal threats to domestic violence. In the case of Shagin’s client, the charge was later vacated and dismissed due to a constitutional violation during the conviction process.
The recent deportations to Bhutan mark the first time the isolated Himalayan nation has accepted exiled Nepali-speaking Bhutanese back into the country from the U.S., before quickly expelling them again.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has not responded to inquiries about what agreements were reached with Bhutan’s government or to comment on the fact that they are being expelled soon after arrival. Neither has the government of Bhutan, or officials in Nepal’s government.
ICE released the names of the first six Bhutanese refugees deported from Pennsylvania, though it has not yet formally acknowledged the most recent deportations. To confirm those, WITF tracked the status of detainees in ICE custody and through conversations with immigration attorneys.
In the late 1980s into the 1990s, Bhutan’s monarchy pushed over 100,000 Nepali-speaking Bhutanese out of the country, revoking their citizenship and labeling them enemies of the state. For close to two decades, those refugees lived in camps in Nepal before a coalition of countries, led by the United States, resettled them between 2008 to 2017.
Today, roughly 40,000 of the 85,000 Bhutanese refugees brought to the U.S. live in Central Pennsylvania, making it the largest Nepali-speaking Bhutanese community outside of Bhutan itself.
Read more from our partners, WITF.
